4 Tips That Will Prepare You for the Future of Search & SEO [Article]
Search Engine Journal puts out consistently good and informative articles in the world of search, and they also they release webinars and host conferences as well. Read more about these 4 tips they present in the article:
- Use Psychology & Technology to Shape Strategy
- Structure Your Site Around Topics
- Think Beyond Google
- Devise a Flexible Measurement Strategy
32 SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Business Website [Expert Roundup]
Full disclosure: I’m featured in this article, but I’m probably one of the least experienced and knowledgable person in this roundup post! There are people from Hubspot, founders, authors, and more that are included in the post. Here’s my tip:
“If you’re just embarking on your SEO campaign, you need to make sure your foundation is solid.
You can write the best content in the world, but if your robots.txt file contains Disallow: / you’re not going to ever rank (because you’re telling Google to ignore your site!).
So you need to:
-Make sure your robots.txt file allows Googlebot to spider your site
-Set your robots tags to index and follow
-Get your site to load in 2 seconds or less
-Make your site mobile-friendly
-Set clear, consistent, and short URL structures
-Make the site easy to navigateGetting these technical aspects in place will lay a strong groundwork for your SEO campaign moving forward.”
SEO Tools: The Complete List (2017 Update) [Roundup Post]
Brian Dean is an amazing digital marketer (as I’ve described before), and if you’re not subscribed to the Backlinko blog do it now, you will not regret it. He compiled this list of of 189 tools that can help with link building, technical SEO, keyword research, and more. You can easily sort the list to see tools pertaining to what exactly you need them for, if it’s free or not, or if you just want to see Brian’s picks.
Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways [Study]
If you know me and my favorite SEO tools, you know that I am a diehard believer in Ahrefs. And along with providing a fantastic tool, it provides very informational blogs. This blog post is a study that delved into the ~112 million keywords Ahrefs has in their database and how many showed featured snippets in the SERP. Answer: ~12.29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results.
There was another study that came out this week that purported that nearly 30% of 1.4 million Google queries tested now show Featured Snippets, but that problem with this study is that it only looked at 1.4 million search queries, so it’s nowhere near as extensive as Ahrefs’ study.
Mary Meeker’s 2017 internet trends report: All the slides, plus highlights [Research]
Mary Meeker’s time honored tradition of her internet trends report is upon us! It’s a huge presentation and this time it total to over 350 slides. It’s good to sift through and at least look at the sections that pertain to your focus in digital marketing. Here are the main takeaways:
- Smartphone shipments have continued to slow, with only 3%year-over-year growth from 2015 to 2016.
- Global internet use continues to grow at 10% year over year, with 3.4 billion people on the internet as of 2016.
- Internet advertising spending is expected to surpass TV spending in 2017.
- Combined, Google and Facebook accounted for 85% of the total internet ad revenue growth between 2015 and 2016.
- Images and voice are replacing typed words in advertising.
- Google’s voice recognition has hit a word accuracy rate of 95%.
- There are now 2.6 billion gamers, up from 100 million in 1995.
Topic Clusters: The Next Evolution of SEO [Article]
This has been a topic of SEO that I have been looking into if we should incorporate it into our strategy moving forward. The idea is that SEOs are looking into how to link connected content under a “topic clusters” model. This article provides actionable tips into how to start doing this for your website.
Random Fun Find: This Is the Age When Your Brain Is at Its Most Random
Who doesn’t want to know when their mind is acting random? Here’s what the article has to say about the randomness of your mind:
“In research published last month in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, mathematician Nicholas Gauvrit and his team at the LABORES Scientific Research Lab, a research institution in Paris, discovered that when it comes to random thinking and decision-making, a person’s ability peaks at about age 25 and then gradually declines for the next several decades, eventually dropping off sharply at around age 60.”